Franke Domestic Appliances

Franke started when Hermann Franke founded a sheet metal business in his name in Rorschach, Switzerland, in 1911 so they've been around for a long, long time.

From that grew the Franke we see today only, for most people, Franke make sinks for your kitchen and no more but that's just one small part of the company's operations. It's biggest sector is in the commercial world making stainless kitchen equipment for commercial kitchens and large chain operations, such as Mcdonalds.

Ordinarily domestic appliance repairers seldom venture into this realm and, until recently, we had little (if anything) to do with Franke as a company on the appliance side. That changed in about 2004 when Franke bought a 49% stake in Faber and it became clear that Franke had plans to venture into the domestic kitchen appliance arena.

Thus far the appliance produced consists of ovens, hobs and hood in a limited range centering on style.

A taste of Franke's ideas for the kitchen appliances with an oven hob and hood set labeled a "system"

Obviously having only been in the market for a few years, with not a lot of information to go on it is difficult to offer much of an opinion on the products as yet. Added to which they seem to only be available from a few retailers and some kitchen specialists in the UK so availability is extremely limited.

Franke Appliances

Decidedly mid to upermarket range with prices for an oven starting at about £400 and rising to over £1000 and, for that sort of money, we'd expect outstanding quality however, with little to no experience of the products we cannot say if they are any good.

Nice clean styling from Franke on their ovens

To be fair the products do look good and certainly have that modern utilitarian design about them which you would pay for from the likes of Smeg anyway. And, being Franke, we would expect that the quality of especially the finishing steel on the outside to be outstanding and executed with the usual Swiss efficiency.

Franke Spares & Service

As yet we have no data to support any comment here. Servicing is carried out nationwide by Independent Service so service levels should be okay but, how good spares and technical backup is, is a total unknown at this time.